Delphine Roberts has been discussed on this newsgroup recently.
I thought I would post Posner's treatment of her, from
CASE CLOSED, pp. 139-141.
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The House Select Committee on Assassinations, however,
reexamined the issue in the late 1970s. Two witnesses now told
the Select Committee they saw Oswald at 544 Camp Street with
Banister. One was Jack Martin, a former private investigator who
sometimes worked with Banister. . . . The second witness was Guy
Banister's former secretary, Delphine Roberts. In one interview,
she told the committee that Oswald had never visited 544 Camp,
but in a subsequent one she said he had been in Banister's office
several times. The Select Committee concluded that because of
the contradictions in Roberts's statements "and lack of
independent corroboration . . . the reliability of her statements
could not be determined. . . . "
Anthony Summers interviewed Roberts in 1978, and she told
him a different, and wilder, story than the one she gave to the
Select Committee. Roberts said that Oswald had come to 544 Camp
Street and she interviewed him to become "one of Banister's
agents," that he maintained an office on the floor above them,
and that he often visited privately with Banister. Summers
interviewed Roberts's daughter, also named Delphine, who claimed
she used an upstairs room for photographic work. She said that
Oswald kept his pro-Castro pamphlets in an office at 544 Camp and
he came there often and knew Banister. Many subsequent
conspiracy writers, as well as Oliver Stone in the film JFK, have
relied heavily on these statements.
The author located both Delphine Roberts and her daughter in
New Orleans. The mother is still a rabid anti-Communist and
racist who rails against the U.N. Charter and "niggers." She
says, "Jesse Jackson is a satan in the skin of a human" and
contends that every Japanese "should have been wiped off the face
of the earth." She claims to be related to the "king and queen
of Wales [sic] and Mary Queen of Scots," as well as "being one of
the very few, since the beginning of the world, who has ever read
the sacred scrolls that God himself wrote and gave to the ancient
Hebrews for placing in the Ark of the Covenant.... I think I
have been the last person to see them." Roberts asserts there
was "Communist involvement" in the JFK assassination, talks
vaguely of a dead pigeon being brought to her by a stranger,
which was then sent off to JFK as a threat, and claims she is
writing a book about the assassination, "although it will also
tell the story of the Creation." She warmly remembers that she
first met Guy Banister when she was demonstrating in downtown New
Orleans "for states' rights, and against the niggers," with a
Confederate flag draped behind her. She said she not only became
Banister's secretary but his mistress as well.
As for Anthony Summers, Delphine Roberts admits, "I didn't
tell him all the truth." She claims the only reason she told him
the story she did was that Summers, then shooting a television
documentary, paid her money. Roberts, who lives with her
daughter, survives on welfare. "He [Summers] said our information
wasn't worth much," she says. "He did give us $500 eventually,
and they did take us to dinner. We did enjoy the dinner." John
Lanne, a former Banister friend and attorney, acknowledges that
Roberts refused to speak to Summers unless she was paid.
As unreliable as Delphine Roberts is regarding the
Oswald/544 Camp Street issue, her daughter spins an equally
untenable tale. She told the author that Oswald did not have an
office at 544 Camp, but rather that "he lived there, had an
apartment there, for two or three months." Oswald came to 544
Camp at night and left every morning, she said, during the same
period that Marina said he was never away from their house for a
single evening (except his overnight stay in jail). She also says
she met Oswald's mother and that "she was lovely." Marguerite
lived in Texas during 1963. When Oswald finally abandoned his
"apartment," Delphine claimed he left behind "boxes and boxes of
pamphlets, everything, just everything."
[FOOTNOTE] Anthony Summers told the author that he had met with
Delphine Roberts at John Lanne's office. There, Lanne, whom
Summers "thought to be fairly mad, certainly odd," pulled a
pistol from his desk, waved it in the air, and told Summers he
could not interview his client, Delphine. Summers drove Delphine
home from that meeting, and during the ride, "she suddenly, more
or less, broke up, put her hands to her face, and said, 'Mr.
Summers, look, why should I bottle this up?'" She then told him
the story he wrote in his book. Following that discussion,
Summers told Roberts that he wanted to do an interview for
television. He says that "several days later, at the urging of
her daughter, Delphine Jr., a big fat lady, she agreed to do the
interview not for $500, but if I rightly recall, for $250 to
$300." Summers says, "Just so you know, the general tariff I make
is that I do not pay people to do interviews for the book, ever,
but I do regard television interviews as a different thing"
(Interview with Anthony Summers, May 31, 1993).
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